Behind Flickr’s New Pricing: Yahoo Really Wants To Show More Ads

It looks like there’s something more to today’s series of Flickr announcements than just bigger images, more storage and a shiny, new design: Yahoo really wants to show more ads.

As you probably heard, Flickr has upped its base storage for all users to an astonishing one terabyte of data. And that’s free. No charge. Zip. Gratis.

It’s a dramatic change to Flickr’s previous account tiers.

Before today, Flickr Pro accounts ran about $25 per year and included several benefits that Free accounts didn’t have:

unlimited photo and video uploads

unlimited storage

unlimited bandwidth

archiving of hi-res images

no ads (on Flickr.com and its mobile apps)

and more

Starting today, Flickr is offering Free and Ad-Free accounts. The ad-free account is now $50 per year (double the old Pro price), and the only benefit it offers is the ad-free experience. All other benefits of paying to use Flickr are gone. (There’s also a “Doublr” account level that offers two terabytes of storage, not one.)

By doubling the price of the paid account and killing all the benefits except not seeing ads, Yahoo is practically begging Flickr users not to have paid accounts.

The only logic behind that seems to be that Yahoo really wants to be able to show more ads to Flickr users.

In Yahoo’s latest earnings report, the company announced that revenue from displays ads was down 11 percent year-over-year. (See the top line of the chart below.)

Today’s Flickr changes, along with the promise that Yahoo will monetize Tumblr, appear to be a couple steps toward changing that downward display trend.

Existing Pro users can switch to a free account by August 20th and still enjoy all of the new things announced today … while also seeing ads. But they don’t have to switch; Flickr’s help page says that existing Pro users will still be able to renew their Pro account in the future. There’s no price point for that. If it’s at the same price that Pro accounts have been (about $25), it means Pro users will be able to enjoy an ad-free Flickr for about half the price of new “Ad Free” account holders.

My guess is that Flickr isn’t counting on having many Pro or Ad Free users in the future, and is looking forward to increasing its display ad inventory.

About The Author

Matt McGee is the Editor-In-Chief of Search Engine Land. His news career includes time spent in TV, radio, and print journalism. After leaving traditional media in the mid-1990s, he began developing and marketing websites and continued to provide consulting services for more than 15 years. His SEO and social media clients ranged from mom-and-pop small businesses to one of the Top 5 online retailers. Matt is a longtime speaker at marketing events around the U.S., including keynote and panelist roles. He can be found on Twitter at @MattMcGee and/or on Google Plus. You can read Matt's disclosures on his personal blog. You can reach Matt via email using our Contact page.

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http://twitter.com/SharonHorswill Sharon Horswill

Well said, Matt. They seem very keen on existing Pro users switching to a free account instead of sensibly allowing their Pro account to expire. We want to show you the ads now! It might store 1TB but Flickr has always been hopeless for retrieval. Who wants to download their images one at a time? I can see the likes of Smugmug making a killing as serious photographers give up and leave Flickr to the kiddies sharing photos on their IdiotPhones.

So let me get this straight. Since Yahoo couldn’t monetize Flickr in any successful way, they are asking the Flickr community to pick up the tab? Now Yahoo has invaded the realm of Tumblr. Suits always ruin a good thing.

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